Page 533 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer 513
from Paul Gerrior doing brilliantly in real life in real time what everyone
thought was acting on screen. He knew exactly what I was doing and he
knew exactly what he was doing, and without so much as either of us
acknowledging the other and breaking the fourth wall, I shot him, peeling
wires, his biceps naturally flexing, his big hairy pecs working, for over
twenty minutes to fix his real image on two four-minute reels of silent,
color film. I did not interrupt him and he did not interrupt me. We both
seemed, locked into that street scene, bonded, two artists knowing exactly
what the other one was creating. Had the perfect voyeur found the perfect
exhibitionist?
It was not until Sunday, June 24, 1979 — the zenith summer of my
three years of editing Drummer — that we converged in the same bed.

When a famous porn star and a famous bodybuilder cruise each
other on the public promenade of 18 and Castro, hook up, and leave
th
together entourage with a known magazine editor, that’s newsworthy on
the Richter Scale! Heads turn; paparazzi shoot; phones ring; gossip ripples
with aftershocks.

On a hyper-cruisy Sunday afternoon, standing outside the Elephant
Walk bar at 18 and Castro, my lover-bodybuilder Jim Enger and I saw
th
Paul Gerrior and his friend Craig Caswell walking up the crowded side-
walk toward us. (Caswell — whose name I think is correct — and I were
lucky enough each to be half of a very public couple.) It was a fireball of
energy when Gerrior and Enger saw each other. Fifteen minutes later,
the four of us were mixed into an only-in-the-70s performance on my
bed at my house on 25 Street. Let me backtrack for a moment. This is
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the way it is with worship: before the four of us went to the bedroom, I
had Jim Enger stall our guests while I excused myself in a stealth move
to take Paul Gerrior’s photograph off the wall over the bed where I had
kept it from 1972 and keep it even today, so perfectly the Platonic Ideal of
the archetypal man was he to me. My Paul Gerrior film still exists. (The
color photograph of Ledermeister called “Stoner” was by Jim French, Colt
Studio, and was published in the centerfold of Queen’s Quarterly, January-
February 1972.)
Here I discreetly draw the curtain across our private theatrical (which
was an archetypal 180-degree antithesis from the stereotypical The Boys
in the Band), but my beige designer sheets with the one bold red stripe
next to the one bold green stripe, like a madeleine from Proust, have been
saved as holy relics which to this day have never been used again, or

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 05-05-2017
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